April 2019

Dear Friends,

Here’s a question for you that may seem ridiculous at first glance, but stay with it a moment. What is the difference between living and dying? 

I suspect one of the hardest challenges in meditation is that we are too much with ourselves. Our minds tighten and narrow by the habitual construct of “I”, “me”, and “my”. Fearful of how we might look to others, we die by not having lived as fully as we might. And yet, when we extend ourselves into adventurous being, it can make all the difference—between drowning and body-surfing, between being controlled by our karma or riding it, like a wave, like the thrill of a lifetime. This is what it means to let go of the self, and also, simultaneously, to live the momentary life of a human being.

Whose life is it anyway? How many life forms, for example, do you suppose live in the context of this beautiful image captured in a moment by a camera? Can you count them?

Lately I’m been reminded of an event from when my father was in his last year of life, living with pulmonary fibrosis. Breathing was hard, walking was hard, everything exhausted him. Nevertheless he had a craving to put his feet in the ocean one last time. One day when I was visiting him, my dad, my daughter and I devised a plan. It was a long way from the parking lot, across a wide swath of shifting sand to the water’s edge. But we set up staging to get there. At a short distance from where we began, we had set out a chair, so that when we arrived to that point, my father could rest. We would make our way in that fashion, advancing by stages to a chair to pause and rest. My daughter and I supported him at either side as we made our slow unsteady way across the shifting sand. My daughter carried an extra chair in case he needed it at any point. And so we made our progress. It was like performance art—extraordinary, because there he was, a truly decrepit old man in the midst of playing, boisterous children, promenading beautiful teens, athletic young people of every kind traipsing across the beach. In the midst of all that, here was an exquisitely moving performance of life being lived by a very old man. 

With great courage and determination, and without the slightest concern for how he might have looked, he made it to the shoreline that day. And indeed, he made it to the “other” shore as well at the very same time, the place of the awakened living mind. Ahhh, cool flowing water!

May it be so for all of us in the exquisite life,

Jeong Ji